I bought this one on the picture from CD-R King, where some of the cheapest electronic supplies are sold,  and it has been helpful.  It gives me up to 15 minutes of time to save my files or send a rush email before the PC finally gives out.

This UPS also has a voltage regulator, so it’s two-in-one. The white power strip beside it is also helpful and saves bits of electricity. PCs still use electricity even if they’re off but unplugged from the electric outlet. With the power strip, you don’t have to unplug anything everytime you stop working on your PC.

Related posts:

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Free HP Printer Scanner Copier with Smart Bro

If you’re a former OFW who paid membership fees when Philhealth was still called Medicare, most probably your record is no longer with Philhealth.  So when you want to be a member again, you will be applying as a new member.

You will use the new membership form, and you need to bring your birth certificate, your marriage certificate (so you can include your spouse as your dependent), and birth certificates (so your children will be enrolled as your dependents).  Bring original and xerox copies.

If your spouse is a former Philhealth member, he/she can’t be enrolled as your dependent even if he/she has not paid her membership fees for more than 12 months. This was my case. I was rejected as a dependent even if I haven’t paid for more than 12 months.

What I should do, according to Philhealth, is to write a letter informing them I haven’t paid my fees and asking them to allow me to accept me as a dependent.  I hope Philhealth will address this issue in the coming months, so this becomes automatic.

Here are the offices of Philhealth:

Main Office:
Citystate Centre,  709 Shaw Boulevard,
Pasig City
Trunkline:  637-9999
info@philhealth.gov.ph

Las Piñas Service Office

471 Editha Building, Alabang-Zapote Road,

Las Piñas City

Telephones:

5565374
5565687
8015256

Manila Service Office

Marc I Bldg., 1971 Taft Avenue,
Malate, Manila

Administrative – 5216776

Claims – 5232819
Collection – 5233959/5213610
Membership – 5217724/5239842

Caloocan Service Office

Remcor Bldg., Rizal Ave. Extension

between 10th & 11th Ave., Caloocan City

3652012

3652014

Quezon City Service Office

F.R. Estuar Bldg., 880 Quezon Avenue,
Quezon City

Office of the Branch Manager – 3323022
Collection Section – 3323024
Membership Section – 3323132
Rizal Service Office

The Brick Road Sta. Lucia East Grand Mall
Cainta, Rizal

6815111

Makati Service Office

ITC Building, 337 Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue,
Makati City

solp@philhealth.gov.ph

The minimum membership payment is 300 pesos (payment for one quarter, 100 pesos per month).  You can pay for 12 months or more.

For those in the Alabang area, the Philhealth office is near SM Southmall. If you’re coming from Alabang, it’s to your right, after passing Southmall.

The sad realities of life, such as deaths and illnesses, have struck our family, so I did not have time to make updates on this blog.

Thank you to all those who made comments on this blog while I was away.

There are lessons learned that I can share here:

1. Make your last instructions now, so your family will know what to do in case the Lord calls you to heaven.

Put your last instructions in a safe place that they can access — your personal drawer or your family safe.

List all insurance or investment plans that they can claim. Tell them where they can find your documents. List the requirements needed to make a claim.

Instruct them to cut your credit cards immediately. Tell them about what they will do regarding your balances.

Tell them about your current debts (such as debts owed to persons) and what you have paid and instruct them about what to do.

Similarly, list the persons who still owe you money and the amounts owed and compile documents or proofs if available. Better yet, collect them now, or put the loans into writing, especially for large amounts.

2. If there are still properties that need to be divided with your brothers and sisters, divide them now, so that your children do not have to do the negotiations with their cousins or uncles and aunts. Transfer the titles directly to your children to save on transfer costs.

3. Show more appreciation to you parents, husband and children. Say thank you more often. Tell them you love them.

Lastly, the most important of all, make sure you are going to heaven. This is not about doing good all the time, or never sinning. This is not possible for anyone.

What is possible now at this moment is to accept you are a sinner, accept Jesus Christ as your only Savior, ask forgiveness from Him and believe you are now saved.

This morning, our neighborhood was stirred up by the sudden piercing cries and screams of a 10-year-old girl inside a long vacant unit beside her family’s house.  “Kuya! kuya! kuya!…”

Neighbors ran to see what happened, and they were shocked to see her 13-year-old brother hanging from a rope tied to one of the exposed beams.

It appeared that the boy has been dead for hours. He must have died during  the night.

The immediate conclusion was that he killed himself. According to most of the stories that soon circulated, the boy has just gone home after running away for a few days, and must have been punished severely.

Several in the neighborhood say that the boy was always being scolded and was always ordered to do chores, barring him from playing.

What must have worsened the situation was that the boy was naturally quiet.  He may have not spoken about what he’s going through with his friends.

The mother of the boy is working abroad, earning for this boy and his two younger sisters.  She left the children with her parents because her husband was apparently irresponsible.

I came to know later that these three kids at one time were taken by the DSW from the husband because he neglected them when they were living with him in the province.

OFw parents are heroes.  They sacrifice.  They bear hours and hours of lonely work in foreign lands… for their children.

But they should ensure that their children are in good hands.  They should instruct their children how they can be contacted directly and easily in case there are problems.

Texting, calling and emailing are now affordable.  Even financially struggling neighbors are willing to lend their cell phone loads, especially if children are involved.  They should talk to their children directly and not always through certain people.

Who am I to judge the people who took charge of the boy?  They are good people too.  The boy is their own flesh and blood.

But why did the boy kill himself?

He was 51.  He died at 11:51 am on January 19 and he wrote his LAST PRAYER at 6:51 pm the night before, exactly 17 hours before he passed away.

I don’t know Press Secretary Cerge Remonde personally. But I liked how he was generally cool when responding to questions during press conferences, although I don’t agree with some of his views.  I liked how he smiled and how he treated his staff.

And I’m touched by his LAST PRAYER — written on his Facebook page 17 hours before he died:

Lord, thank you for your infinite love
that meets our every need
and provides all the beautiful
and wonderful things we experience in life.

Release our hearts and minds from fear and worry.
Fill us with your peace
as we learn to fully trust in your providence.

Help us to do all that we are capable of
and the rest we entrust unto you.
Amen.

There was a time in my younger years when our family and most families in our village were about to harvest from our rice fields that have turned golden and have made the air smell of bounty and sufficiency. But the floods came and turned that year and the next year our most trying years, when families had to eat literally camote and other root crops for months.

Back then, there were no OFWs to ask aid from, and there were no TV stations that looked for places to help and there were no foundations or government agencies that distributed noodles or canned goods.

The farmers interviewed on TV lost their harvest, ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 pesos, including their source seeds. Many of them will also have to pay loans for the fertilizers, herbicides and rental farming equipment.

But they all ended their statements with “Nabiag tay pay met. Dimi ammo no kasano, ngem ikarigatan ti bumangon“ — which means “We’re still alive. We don’t know how, but we will strive to rise again.”

Photo of flooded village taken by Erik de Castro for Reuters

In our place in Muntinlupa, in the highest part of the city, bordering Cavite and Laguna, there are still a lot of open spaces — green all around when rains abound and brown when the dry season lengthens.

So it is typical for us residents here to see cows, chickens, goats and turkeys, mingling with FXs, cars, jeepneys and people.

We live a bit north of this subdivision.  Ours is not fenced.

According to Nikko Dizon in the April 4, 2009 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

• All 17 members of the Highway Patrol Group involved in the so-called Paranaque shooting last December 5 attended the Commission on Human Rights’ hearing on April 3.
• All didn’t testify; they invoked their right to remain silent.
• Two witnesses affirmed the testimony of one witness in the January hearing that only police operatives were in the area when the shooting happened.
• These two witnesses also disputed the claim that robbers in a Revo van shot the De Veras.
• One witness said he saw men wearing vests with the Regional Special Action Force letters.
• Another witness testified he heard the police operatives saying they had killed the driver of the vehicle, who later turned out to be Lilian’s husband Alfonso

Cops in shootout invoke right to stay silent

Nikko Dizon

Philippine Daily Inquirer

You need a combined thesaurus and dictionary to help you with your writing some of the time. And of course, you want an easy-to-use, complete, current and accessible one. WordWeb is it. You will be glad you discovered it. The free version is as good as any dictionary on the Internet. You can download it and then put a shortcut on your desktop. For freelance writers like me, this is an amazing gift.

2. Blogger

Not only you can use blogger.com to host your sites, you can also use it to easily compose your posts or articles for other sites. For example, you’re writing for Squidoo which doesn’t have an automatic html feature, or you’re composing something for your Wordpress sidebar, and you need to put links or you need to put some words in colors or in better fonts, you just go to the Create New Post of your blogger.com account, click Compose and then create your posts or short notes. After you finish, click Edit Html, and then you have it, your short notes in Html format. Of course, Wordpress has a more sophisticated writing interface, but I’ve found that blogger.com loads and responds very fast for short posts and notes for my Wordpress sidebars.

3. Fotoflexer

This is one of the easiest free online editing photo editors I’ve found. You don’t even have to register before using it. Just upload your photo from your PC, or get it from other online photo hosts such as picasaweb, and then you can start editing your photo. Fotoflexer is good for non-Photoshop experts like me because it has an Undo feature that you can click many times. It also has Apply and Cancel buttons. When you try the tools such as Effects and Beautify, you can try clicking all options and then click Cancel if you don’t like the result.

4. Webmasterlabor

If you’re a freelance writer, you would like to make sure that your article is not exactly the same as any other article on the Internet. Surely, you wouldn’t like anyone to think of even just a taint of plagiarism when they read your article. Even if you know you wrote it on your own, it pays to check it. Just paste your article on the box, click Compare with Google, copy the number shown, click Compare and then wait for a few minutes until a new page appears. Click New and then you’d see if some of your phrases have duplicates on the internet. Of course, if you have the paid Copyscape service, you don’t need this. There are other tests, which I would describe in another article.

Notice: As of May 2009, this site has stopped its plagiarism checking service. As a substitute, I recommend plagiarism.detect. This needs registration and accomplishment of a short usage survey.

5. Create your Own Widget-Ready Footer in Wordpress

This article is specially mentioned, although there are lots of helps across the internet, because it was really helpful to me. It was just Copy and Paste, and some little tweaks in the CSS after. If you’re using a Wordpress theme that has no footer “sidebar”, and you like to have one, here’s a set of instructions very easy to follow. Just copy and paste. There is just one instruction there that you need to change– the codes that you need to paste on your footer.php. Just download the files the author is asking you to download. Open the footer.php in Word and then copy the subfooter block. This is the one you need to copy and paste on your footer.php. Perhaps the author just wants us to think a little and not just copy and paste and then sleep.

The following is a copy of an email written by Lilia De Vera, whose husband Alfonso and 7-year-old daughter were killed in a shootout involving  NCRPO police officers on the night of December 5, 2008 in United Paranaque Subdivision 4:

Two months ago I considered myself as one of those blessed and happiest
people on earth. Why not? I married a guy who was an epitome of kindness. A guy who worshipped even the footsteps I made. More importantly, our union blessed us with a daughter who not only became the main source of our happiness. More so, she was the center of our lives.

We’re simple folks who led a simple life. We felt the happiest even about
mundane things and inconsequential ones that most people would only take
for granted. Our joy mostly revolved on simple pleasures like a sudden trip
to Jollibee or a late night marauding of the fridge for any leftovers. A perfect family with simple delights, dreams and aspirations… until that
fateful night on December 5, 2008. The day my husband and daughter were
taken away from me in a very violent way. That Friday night on December 5,
2008 marked the beginning of all the terror, anguish and misery in my life.

In keeping with my ritual or “panata” on every first Friday of every month,
I went to Quiapo Church on the above mentioned date to pay homage and
respect to the Almighty One. My husband and daughter were supposed to pick me up in Pasay City after which we planned on giving our daughter a treat to Jollibee. While riding the jeep, I tried to call my husband to tell him
that I was on my way to our meeting place. But despite all the calls I
made, my husband remained silent. A very unusual occurrence inasmuch as he seldom missed my calls. Despite my trepidation and wonder, I took the next jeep going home and prayed that everything was alright. I even promised to myself that I would forgive my husband for not answering my calls and for forgetting to pick me up.

I felt relieved when near our place my phone rung. Such relief was somehow
only momentary? In fact the phone call I got was the bearer of the worst
news in my entire life.  My helper called, only to tell me that my husband
and daughter were shot to death by “men in uniform”. The same men who were sworned to protect innocent people from bad guys brutally slew the two most important persons in my life. They were the same men whose sacred duty was to preserve the lives of the public against all harm and danger. Yet?? they were the same men who murdered my love ones in the most cruel, savage and inhuman way.

My husband’s face was unrecognizable because he was shot in the head at
close range while he was kneeling with his head bowed down. My daughter’s young body was riddled with bullets, one hit her head, blowing her brains out, all from too powerful guns and ammunitions fired by the “men in uniform” on two innocent and defenseless persons.

The “men in uniform” were allegedly on a mission to take some gang of
robbers victimizing people at large. The police shot the Crosswind van my
husband and daughter were riding.  Based on some witnesses’ narration, the
police sprayed bullets into the van despite the lack of provocation or
shots coming from the  van. In his last effort to save their lives, my
husband grabbed my bloodied daughter and shielded her with his body while trying to run away from the police and tried to get cover from a parked
jeepney. My husband and daughter were so defenseless. How can you mistake a child for a robber? How can you shot at someone who was already kneeling with head bowed, an indication of helplessness.

My husband and daughter are gone…forever. The pain I feel for their loss is too much too bear. And the only thing that motivates me to go on with
life is the mission to seek justice for their senseless killing. If the
people who are responsible for their death will be punished, if I could
bring them the justice they so richly deserve, my pain would be alleviated.
The misery I will live by will be lessened. My husband and daughter will be
vindicated and I will learn to live the remaining years of my life in
peace.

Thus, I’m asking and begging everyone who will come across this
letter/e-mail to forward the same to all your relatives, friends, and
acquaintances.  Help me bring my cause to the eyes of the people capable of
steering the wheel of justice to the right direction. Help me make the
loudest cry worthy of attention by those people in-charge in rendering
justice to those who deserve it.

Strength comes in numbers; it is where the impossible becomes possible. It
is also where the unattainable becomes achievable.

My heartfelt gratitude for everyone who will take a moment in their too
busy lives and forward this letter/e-mail to everyone they know. May God
always protect you and your love ones from all harm.

Lilian de Vera

Update on From Lilian de Vera (victim of the Paranaque shooting incident)